The website of an organization called Plants Need CO2 notes that “Carbon dioxide is green . . .
and green is good!” The group has a point. Plants do need carbon dioxide, and water, too.

Still, a lot of people on the East Coast might be wondering if too much of that good carbon
dioxide had anything to do with all that water in their subway tunnels and living rooms.
Climate-change models predict an increasing number of superstorms such as Sandy in the future.

In biology, the benefits of carbon dioxide and water depend upon their amounts. Anyone who tries
to grow a garden knows the harm of over-watering or under-watering it.

Plants use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to synthesize sugar; hence the term
photosynthesis. Every high school in the country expects its students to understand
this.

Some of the physics and chemistry of photosynthesis is complex, but we have an intuitive feel
for its biological aspects.

Carbon dioxide and water are not rich in usable energy; we stop fires with them. Sugar, on the
other hand, is rich in usable energy and burns readily. Think of marshmallows over campfires.

Why do plants synthesize sugar? It’s certainly not to provide us with maple syrup or frost our
corn flakes. We tap into plants for sugar just as aphids do, and plants would do fine without
us.

Plants use sunlight energy bound up in their sugars to drive the chemical reactions of their
lives, such as growing leaves and reproducing. Plants also use sugar molecules as building blocks
in making wood. When we burn that wood, we release the sunlight the plants used to make it.

Every grade-school student who has ever visited a museum or surfed the Web knows that buried
trunks of trees and bodies of marine algae eventually became today’s coal, oil and natural gas. We
release the sunlight that plants used millions of years ago to make those fossil fuels.

Along with the prehistoric sunlight used by those plants and algae, we also release the
prehistoric carbon dioxide they used in synthesizing sugar. High-school biology students know this
as the carbon cycle. Over the past couple of hundred years, we have begun releasing millions of
years of stored, prehistoric carbon dioxide. No wonder we’re awash in the stuff.

Why would a nonprofit organization such as Plants Need CO2 want to “educate the public on the
positive effects of . . . CO2 ”? The website is registered to a director of EOG Resources and an
honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute. EOG Resources was formerly known as Enron
Oil and Gas, a Fortune 500 company.

A nonprofit organization and website started by a fossil-fuel-industry executive to educate the
public about the benefits of carbon dioxide is reminiscent of the Tobacco Institute. Tobacco
companies started that organization to put smoking in a good light as concerns about lung cancer
grew.

Climate-change models predict more Sandy-class superstorms. Recent and future victims of those
storms will probably see industry-based campaigns about good carbon dioxide as another smoke
screen.